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Ubuntu says no to non-free video drivers for Feisty (Linux.com)Ubuntu says no to non-free video drivers for Feisty (Linux.com)Posted Feb 14, 2007 4:46 UTC (Wed) by mbottrell (guest, #43008)Parent article: Ubuntu says no to non-free video drivers for Feisty (Linux.com)
That's great... but the current flux with the G965 video chipset isn't an alternative at present.
Unfortunately it's a matter of numbers... that the majority of cards in Desktop PCs are still ATI or nVidia.
Intel have announced that they are going to start building standalone video cards, but if it's anything like the G965 exoerience it will drag behind.
I wish Intel would release the damn drivers as an upgrade package of your distro of choice... currently one needs to wait until their distro picks up the latest X and package it up...
I'll buy Intel cards... but I really do want the support at the time they go on sale... 6-12 months behind product shipment is crazy.
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Ubuntu says no to non-free video drivers for Feisty (Linux.com) Posted Feb 14, 2007 5:07 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Well actually the majority of desktop PCs, or laptop PCs or any PC has Intel graphics.
They have something like 60% of the market.
If your thinking of 'gaming' machines or anything like that.. G965 will not realy be very usefull for that. For 3D desktop it will be fine, though.
Right now the 945g chipset is pretty easy to come by. They make great little machines.
A nice little example would be something like:
Personally I built my PC on a Asus motherboard and Pentium-D 930 dual core cpu. Happily using those VT extensions to run KVM...
Ubuntu says no to non-free video drivers for Feisty (Linux.com) Posted Feb 14, 2007 6:29 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Just for a FYI..
I played around trying different things to get the best performance out of my 945g GMA 950 and these are the things that I've found out to help..
In my xorg.conf I did:
Not sure what mtrr is, but it did give me a decent performance boost. Also it lowered the cpu overhead of running glxgears by a large margin.
VideoRAM has it allocate a full 128megs of RAM. I think the GMA 950 can do up to 256 and the G965 can do up to 512.
LinearAlloc is to allocate enough ram to be able to use XV for HD-sized video.
Not sure if UseFBDev is nessicary though.
Then before running games or anything that I want to use 3d acceleration with I do:
I don't know exactly what that is suppose to do, but I think it disables ome RandR stuff.
Then 16bit graphics will help you get a bit more out of your limited memory bandwidth, but it makes things look ugly sometimes.
All these things together probably gave me a 75% - 100% boost in 3D performance, which makes it usable for games like Tremulous.
FC6 or Ubuntu? Posted Feb 14, 2007 15:12 UTC (Wed) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224) [Link] drag, are you using FC6 on this system, or Ubuntu?
FWIW, I just purchased a mid-level laptop and a low low end desktop, and I specifically went for the Intel graphics (950 GMA on both) and the Intel PRO/Wireless 3945 on the laptop (which actually cost more than the standard OEM provided wireless) because of the open source driver support Intel provides. So yes, I put my money where my beliefs are!
So hey AMD(ATI)/Nvidia - here's a sale you LOST because of your poor support for open source drivers. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.
I dropped off the Red Hat bandwagon a while ago and went to Debian, but I expect either FC6 or Ubuntu will work better on the laptop than stock Debian.
Thanks,
PS: Now if they'd only included a PATA port on the desktop - sigh... time to go hunt down a PCIe PATA card... any recommendations?
FC6 or Ubuntu? Posted Feb 14, 2007 21:45 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] I am using Debian unstable.
However I installed using the Debian Etch media, if I remember correctly.
I have a Asus motherboard with the Intel 945g chipset.. On it it has the 4 port SATA controller and then one PATA controller that comes with the chipset.. Then there is one add-on PATA controller from Asus and I am not sure about the manufacture of that.
(As far as these things go Asus is actually pretty Linux freindly. They are now my favorite name-brand)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) IDE Controller (rev 01)
On mine in order to get the cdrom drive be recognized in Debian Etch I had to disable some bios setting just for that controller, but I don't remember off the top of my head what that was. Doesn't affect the speed of the drive any.
As for a PATA PCIe card? I don't know. Just get the cheapest, I suppose, that advertises Linux support.
Doing a quick look over what Newegg has I think it may be easier to just get a SATA dvdrom drive. I have a feeling that PCIe IDE controllers are going to be difficult to come by.
It would probably have a higher reliability also when it comes to burning dvds and such. There was a lite-on that was about 40 dollars or so. I don't know how well installing from one will go, but I don't expect it to be that hard.
I know that you already bought your motherboard and such.. But one thing to keep in mind for these 945g's and such is this (especially if you want to turn it into a server once you retire your desktop):
Most newer ones should support the Intel VT extensions. This will allow you to run unmodified guests at decent speeds using KVM or Xen. In order to use these extensions you need to have both a motherboard and a cpu that supports it. The cheapest CPUs that supports it is the Pentium-D 9xx series (the 8xx series doesn't support VT)
Then on the SATA controller you can get ones with AHCI support. Very recent linux versions have very good ACHI support for things like hotplugging, PM, and such. Most desktop boards aren't going to support it. (mine doesn't) You'd have to go with the 'execuative' line or the media boards. Anything advertising Intel's 'Matrix storage' probably supports it.
That stuff would be very nice if your running software RAID. A fast dual core cpu with 4 500gig drives in RAID 10 would be _very_ nice for a multimedia machine.
Ubuntu says no to non-free video drivers for Feisty (Linux.com) Posted Feb 14, 2007 6:59 UTC (Wed) by arjan (subscriber, #36785) [Link] (disclaimer: I work for Intel)
the 965 graphics drivers got released before the hardware was commercially available.... I don't understand your suggestion that they were not...
(It may be that not all distros picked them up, but to a large degree that is a problem of the distros; Intel can only do so much there, we make the driver, we ask them to include it and even offer help with that. Beyond that it's out of our control)
Ubuntu says no to non-free video drivers for Feisty (Linux.com) Posted Feb 14, 2007 16:08 UTC (Wed) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link] The parent wasn't suggesting the drivers weren't released, but that they weren't available to users.
Kernel drivers, by comparison, are often compilable against the current kernel in a system without _too_ much hassle. Worst case it's pretty workable to just update to whatever kernel is necessary.
The steps to deploy a new version of X.org in a running system are often not known, not documented, and not achievable by normal users. Despite the goal of maintaining a stable interface bewteen drivers and X.org core, I don't seem to find any simple instructions on deploying a new driver against whatever X.org core I have installed. Is this realistically possible?
Even then I think you lose because you really have to deploy a new Mesa and new dri (and new drm) for the new card.
Ubuntu says no to non-free video drivers for Feisty (Linux.com) Posted Feb 14, 2007 16:08 UTC (Wed) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link] Oh and yes, expecting Intel to fix all this is a bit much. I agree.
Ubuntu says no to non-free video drivers for Feisty (Linux.com) Posted Feb 14, 2007 16:35 UTC (Wed) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] Just a random thought:
replace the "Linux drivers" link with a link to a recent live CD (that contains only free drivers) that supports that hardware well.
If such a reference distribution supports the hardware, other users will be able to replicate the settings.
(As I said: just a random thought)
Ubuntu says no to non-free video drivers for Feisty (Linux.com) Posted Feb 14, 2007 17:20 UTC (Wed) by arjan (subscriber, #36785) [Link] I think it's fair to expect your distro to do this for you.. this is what support/maintenance is about to some degree...
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